MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Tuesday, 18 June 2013

POEM FROM BUDAVOX

I am currently going through my many collections and pamphlets to select poems for my American Selected, out next year. Here is one of the poems I will include, from 1999's Budavox, my debut collection...

A SOLEMN MEDITATION ON THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Gamma Rays pierced them, they returned heroic

though not without difficulties. When all changes,

much remains, but different, even unfortunately

strange, and powerful, so that men point in streets,

their hats tumbling off, and women drop groceries,

to see Galactus, or his herald, in bubbles of
concrete,

atoms in galaxies in Manhattan, thrown for a
challenge,

and earth-shattering conclusions left monthly,
balanced

by the sheer crazy threats of barely thwarted
annihilation

and what being super frames. It’s clobbering time,
yet

not all matters can be solved with orange-granite
fists,

limbs that stretch like gum, a molten body of a boy,

or a girl whose fields are clear as glass but cannot
yield

their molecular force. Because human, we love as
well

as when, to war, we put our armor on, and fend for
Troy

or Helen; each wall that’s a breakthrough for one
army

is another’s black hole, defeat whorling in like
vacuum

and nothing left save rubble, weakness and air half-fire,

and the rumor of more ruin on the way, the next
landing:

the world a place to be conquered by a Silver
Surfer, or

a Submariner, blowing what belongs to Triton, Hudson

roiling at the emergence of an aquamarine attack,
noble

in its grand indifference to the mere lunged New
Yorkers,

abashed but inured to wanton villains and their
grandiosity

now that the Baxter Building is the Ur-magnet for
wild evil.

Yet, how can Mr. Fantastic knowingly enter the
fragile

space of his own beloved, without a shameful
thought,

that what simple anatomy has wrought, his husbandry

may undo, with his newfound abilities, pure
expansion?

Obscenity is no part of the vows that bind a man to
spouse

but in the broken house that is radiation’s special
curse,

who can argue for his long-legged will to stay, just
so?

And who may know the proper measure of Ben Grimm’s

agony: mightier than a slaughterhouse of oxen, still
stone

on stone, and tangerine, his hands a clear sign of
clumsy

cold, no subtle fingers here, a demolition of
thumbs, a face

like a wrecking ball, and all the passion of a
normal man?

Might he not want to break down, be regular now, and
take

the blind girl in his athlete’s arms, again, no
pressure to tackle

Victor Von Doom? Consider the Invisible Girl, later
Woman,

whose grace is to go unnoticed, who can keep the
rain off

with a shrug of atoms, does she want her genius long
or short;

maybe after a homely battle, she may turn her back
and leave

her powers on, so no marriage can reach, no matter
the arms

that struggle to strain and pound at her inviolable
places?

For Johnny Storm, no tonnage of car wax or peroxide
obscures

his film idol’s grin eats only oxygen and spits lewd
fire, his trim

physique a mitochondrion’s macrocosm gone supernova.
Sure,

he’s beauty jetting from a flame-thrower, a solar
rose, flight

hotly incarnate, a stream of fuel lit and flown
across the sky,

lean muscle in a tight blue uniform that accepts the
burn.;

but this, and less. He cannot lift his playmates to
the sun

as he may go, but must return too soon with lovers
to the ground.

They’ve found, all four, and each as fantastic as a
bestiary’s apocrypha,

a sullen access to the null and void of life, where
Midas fondled yellow.